Sean Park Portrait
Quote of The Day Title
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few.
- Shunryu Suzuki

Regular service resumed.

Did you notice? If not perhaps I shouldn’t say anything. No harm, no foul.

But just in case you were wondering, yes, parkparadigm.com was down for almost two weeks. It started with a corrupted file server and then well things got complicated. But I have to give it to Jof and Benjie at Brainbakery; not only did they have my back, their calm professionalism saved this old man from a heart-attack in the wee hours of the morning on that fateful night. I owe them dinner and since they are charming company as well it will be my pleasure.

I always try to look for the silver lining, and in this case I think there are two. First, I now know more about how the plumbing of these here internets work – nothing like a crisis to help one climb a learning curve. And second, I now realize just how embedded this blog is in how I work, think and project my ideas into the wider world. That may sound obvious, and it’s more a question of degree, but had you asked me two weeks ago, I’m not sure I would have admitted or understood just how valuable this little patch of the metaverse has become for me.

And I hope you are still here, not having been put off forever by the temporary purgatory of a ‘server not found’.

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Permalink||Comments|Filed under 'Miscellaneous'
  • Are you going to publish a "lessons learned"? Might help the rest of us avoid a similar debacle.
  • I'm not sure you can really generalize from my experience. I mean try to avoid changing domain host, names servers and A-records all at the same time (but I suspect nobody would ever deliberately do this.) Also I would probably avoid ukhost4u although to be fair to them, they weren't at the root of the problem, but more because if you want to change anything in terms of configuration you can't do it yourself but need to raise a ticket. This can lead to a heighten sense of frustration as you are dependent on what seems to be a somewhat random process...
  • Painful process but glad you see the silver lining.
    Hope too that you'll be making more of it now that you've gained new insight.
  • Good to see you back Sean, I did wonder what had happened.

    See my comment on your post, 'The science of financial regulation', about how the modern business needs to understand precisley how data flows:

    http://www.parkparadigm.com/2009/06/05/the-science-of-financial-regulation/#comment-491666

    Some of your data stopped flowing and it sounds like it was a bit of wake up call. Scale your experience up to a major bank and you can imagine the disruption and cost even if data stopped flowing for only a few hours. In finance over 90% of money exists in the form of data, so if the flow stops it's a major problem.

    Unfortunately, across all business sectors, we can expect increasing numbers of incidents where critical flows are interupted. The explanation for this is quite simple. Most business do not have clarity about how everything is put together to make the organisation work, which means they can't see clearly where they need to mitigate risk.

    Businesses need to clearly understand the (data) plumbing and precisley how it interacts with the business.
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